Wednesday, January 11, 2006

 

Standings Watch - West

Monday we posted the East standings thru 40 games; now that San Jose has played their 40th, here's the West standings. Points:



And goal differential:



Notes of interest:
If you notice anything else interesting, add it in the comments.

Comments:

The distribution of goal-differential in the East is almost totally explicable by Ottawa's dominance. On the other side the explanation is that we have two REALLY bad teams and another that's no better than Pissburgh. The net transfer of GD between the conference is only 17 goals, which is about one goal per team, so that's driving the in-conference distributions only slightly.
 


Where are you getting your numbers? By my calculations Phoenix also has a serious negative differential (-12).
 


Uh, -12 is serious? Through 43 games that's almost a rounding error. Columbus is at -59 and St. Louis -51 on my spreadsheet.
 


Well, it is serious compared to the positive differential implied by Matt when he said only three teams in the West were negative.

I have Columbus at -59 and St. Louis at -52. How is this possible.

My spreadsheet automatically updates from Yahoo -- maybe their standings are screwy.
 


Wait, I lied. Mine updates from the NHL.com standings, which is frequently behind the Yahoo standings.

Meh. It really doesn't matter. The bottomw line is that the Central division is a travesty.
 


The difference between my 0 and your -12 is their 41st, 42nd, and 43rd games, which they lost 4-0, 5-2, and 7-2.

I noted this after the 1st quarter, but I should repeat it as well: the GD numbers for the League do not add up to zero as it's not a closed system (e.g. because of games where one team is playing its 20th game against another that's playing its 21st, etc.).

That's why, on my Thru 40 standings, the East is -33 while the West is only +5.
 


Wow! I was even going to make a joke about how Phoenix couldn't have dropped 12 goals against in the three missing games -- you can't get away with anything around here.
 


My sheet also happens to calculate this stuff backwards from goals-per-game figures just because of the way it's set up, so occasionally I'll be off by a goal.

Also, I have to hit "refresh data" for the damn thing to be up-to-date; including the eight Tuesday games the interconference transfer is actually 18 goals.
 

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